No.
Her body is treacherous to respond to this man, here, now. Harlan had his chance. She loves her husband.
She feels the impulse to flee, and the muscles in her legs tense. But he has frozen her. She is going nowhere. His claim on her is fresh, real.
Damn him.
“Jackie. Please look at me.”
She takes a half step back, creating a buffer. She’s aware of other people nearby, talking, laughing; she can’t imagine what they are saying. She is numb, confused, ashamed.
“Jackie.”
She lifts her eyes. The air separating her from Harlan is made of crystal.
“I can’t—” His voice falters, but his eyes are certain. He is in pain. His pain is for her.
She sees it. He allows her to.
Jackie grabs hold of the railing, unsteady. She squeezes. The hard, cold metal ushers a signal up her arm, breaking the spell.
She drains her wine, sets the glass on a bar table behind her. “It’s freezing up here.” She rubs her arms, erasing gooseflesh, to show it is true. Jackie steals a glance at Harlan, but he is now surveying the people behind her, casually, as if the two of them are both somewhat bored with their small talk and are ready to move on.
“You go in,” he says, mild as a June morning.
Jackie hesitates. A moment before, he was bare to her, utterly. According to a moral calculus she cannot explain, it seems wrong to leave him like this. “Aren’t you going down to dinner?”
He glares at her, his irises fusing with his pupils, black as sin. A rushing sound fills her ears. He places his drink on the railing, shoots his cuffs as if he wears black tie every night, and walks away.
CHAPTER 10
Last year, Jackie and Miles were late to Thanksgiving dinner at her sister’s in Staunton, caught behind a big rig crash on Interstate 66 out of DC. So this year they leave at eight o’clock, armed with coffee and muffins for the road, plus citrus sweet potatoes, pecan pie, several bottles of wine, and a bouquet of yellow roses—Grace’s favorite. The drive is only two hours, but Jackie figures they can help Grace and Hector with the dinner and kids. With five, adults are always in short supply.
Miles is driving and singing along with Adele on the radio, his voice soft but perfectly tuned. Jackie smiles. For several weeks she’s successfully reined in her preoccupation with Harlan and Nasira, and although Miles has been away five days of the week, their time together has been nearly conflict-free. Antonio is teetering on the verge of needing to be checked into rehab again, but he’s resisted—with Miles’s acquiescence. Jackie wants to see Antonio complete the semester, too, but his health should take priority. She’s only the stepmother, though. Antonio’s mother, according to Miles, has never taken their son’s problems as seriously as she should, so it is down to Miles to work things out with him.
“You’re lost in space,” Miles says.
“I was wishing Antonio could have come this year. I know his mother flew in for the break, but I would’ve loved to have him be with my family.” Jackie paused. “Other than my mom.”
“Your mom’s not so bad.”
“Compared to whom? Hannibal Lecter?”
He laughs. “When is she arriving at your sister’s?”
“After the kids are asleep.”
He glances at her. “You’re joking.”
“Only slightly. I mean, my sister’s house is the embodiment of chaos. I get that.”
“But as a grandmother, she should be tolerant.”
“Or delighted. Many grandmothers are delighted with five healthy, adorable grandkids. I’m only an aunt and I’m delighted.”
They exit I-81 and head west into Staunton, passing the old brick buildings of the state asylum on the hill to the left. The next exit off the interstate offers a slightly more direct route to Grace’s house, but Miles knows that Jackie likes to swing through her hometown. Not much changes, but Jackie keeps tabs. It’s a game.
At the next stoplight, Jackie points down the next block. “Look, Miles. That’s the third restaurant in that building in two years. Think it will stick?”
He cranes his neck to see the sign. “Trapeza. Greek for ‘table.’”
“Who knows that?”
“Every English schoolboy.” He turns left onto Middlebrook Road. “Drive by?”
“Yes, please.”
A left on West Hampton and left again on Winthrop. The houses on this tree-lined street are nearly all the same: two stories high, two rooms wide, and three rooms deep, with full-width front porches, modestly adorned with decorative spindles, sidelights around the doors, and brackets at the top of the porch supports. Each house is painted a different color. Jackie’s childhood home, her mother’s house, is white with red shutters, with the front door on the left, between a blue house and a pale-green one. Farther up the street, where Miles will turn around, are a few older, more stately brick buildings. Jackie’s mother always coveted one. It was a sore spot, the brick houses so near yet out of reach. The blame went to Jackie’s father.
Miles slows down in front of the house.
“Okay,” Jackie says. She knows Miles doesn’t think there’s anything to see but is too polite to say so. Jackie is compelled to visit the house (but not her mother) whenever she is nearby. The house adds heft to her memories and reattaches her to her sister. We lived here, inside these walls, Grace and I. We slept under that roof, learned to walk in that backyard, took baths together in the tub with the chipped enamel, and when our father left, he went out that front door. From this distance, the house still belongs to Jackie. As soon as she steps inside, it is her mother’s house, every inch of it. She is a visitor, and visitors don’t belong.
Miles points across the street to a peeling gray house; the front lawn has become a field. “I still don’t understand why that’s not on the market.”
“The kids can’t agree on what to do with it. It’ll fall down first.”
“That’s tragic.”
“It is.” But Jackie hasn’t been looking at the gray house. Her eyes are fixed on her house, picturing herself at twelve.
Jackie stood on the porch counting to one hundred so she wouldn’t turn around and watch Matthew King leaving. She could hear his skateboard rumbling down the sidewalk. But was he looking back at her? That was the question. Jackie didn’t check. She played it cool.
As she opened the front door, her mother pounced on her. “You’re thinking about kissing that boy, aren’t you?”
“What boy?”
“Don’t be smart. The one practically on top of you on the porch.”
Jackie focused on her mother’s right earring and thought of the most boring thing she could—reciting the states in alphabetical order—and was glad she had counted to a hundred earlier, dropping her pulse. She sighed hugely. “Oh, you mean Matthew? He’s just a friend.”
Her mother scoffed and jabbed the air with the eyeglasses she was holding. “That’s how it starts. I suppose he’s funny, too. Remember what I told you about men and their senses of humor. Get you laughing and you’ll forget you were once an intelligent, independent person without the slightest desire to do the bidding of a man-child.”